“No, I’m not kidding. It was interesting.”
“The awful thing is, I’m sure you did it to find out what it felt like, or for some other half-assedly commendable reason.”
“The main thing,” I explained, “isn’t that I was so scared, but if you get off this very thin line, you get angrier than a motherfucker—”
“Look,” she said, “you wouldn’t kill somebody just to find out what it felt like.”
“It would be easier here than any place else.”
“Christ!” She looked up at the sky.
“Okay,” I said. “So you don’t approve. Why are you angry?”
“Because,” and her eyes came down to mine, “in some funny way I think it’s my fault. And don’t ask me to explain that; or you’ll get angry.”
While I tried to figure out some way to get her to explain, practical Denny asked: “What’d you get?”
“Three bucks. For the work, it pays better than the Richards’s.” I reached over for my pants, took the bills out of my pocket, and gave them to him. “Here.” I glanced at Lanya with a little smile. “I’d split it between you, but she won’t take one.”
She got a tightish expression that let me know she certainly would.
Denny looked at the bills and repeated: “Wow!” Thinking: He would use the same inflection if he discovered something had been stolen from him. “Here.” Denny handed one bill to Lanya and—“Here, you keep one. That way we can split it up right”—one back to me. “I gotta take a piss.” He stood and walked away, palms facing back, the bill wrapped on the middle finger of his left hand.
Lanya watched me. “I suppose I’d find you dull if you didn’t keep dropping stuff like that into my head. No, don’t say anything. I’m still thinking.” She pushed herself to her knees. “I’ve got to take a piss too.” Her buttocks and one thigh were printed from the roofing paper.
At the corner drain, Denny looked back over his shoulder. “You going downstairs to the bathroom?”
“No,” she said in a considered tone that, when the rest of their exchange was finished, should have made me realize she knew what it was going to be.
“Oh, yeah. I guess you can squat here.” Denny finished and shook himself.
“What makes you think I have to squat to piss?”
“You’re a girl. You can’t do it st…I mean I thought girls had to sit down or something.”
“Jesus God!” Lanya said.
“Well, how do you guide it then?” Denny asked.
“Same way you do.”
“But you don’t have a—?”
She held up two fingers in a peace sign, turned them down against her cunt and sort of pulled. “Like that, if you must know. Now would you please stop staring and let me pee?”
“Oh…yeah.” Denny frowned. “Sometimes I can’t piss in a john if somebody’s staring right at my dick.” He turned away, glanced back, away again. “Wow.”
Like something had been given back to him.
He went to the wall. “Now I never knew that,” he said.
When she came up, he was looking at the harmonica; turned and handed it to her across my shoulder.
“You know how to play it?” she asked.
“Naw.”
“The scale starts here,” she said. “See, at the fourth hole.”
We went down (putting on clothes half here, half there), and in the living room got into the discussion with some of the people mentioned (Fireball, Filament, et al) that I wanted to write down some of the things Lanya said in it in the first place. (When I started this, I’d thought that the business about Lanya being turned on by all those funny things about me, and what had happened on the roof would make a good prologue, because in the discussion she referred to them) but again I’m tired of writing it down, now that I’ve gotten to the substance.
One of the things that also went down in the discussion was an argument about getting food, which I guess was really what started the whole thing, and this other part just came up; but my mind follows funny tracks.
It had to do with the differences (and similarities) between the girls who were scorpions and the girls who just hung around with us. With reference to the guys who were members and the guys who just hung. It was a good discussion to have and a dull one to reconstruct. And I guess it was mainly for Mike’s benefit anyway (Mike is one of said guys who hangs, a long-haired friend of Devastation’s; sleeps here most of the time but also doesn’t want to join) and I guess/think/suspect one difference between members and non-members anyway is that members know the difference already and don’t have to talk about them (that politeness again) though from some of the things Tarzan says, I wonder.
an intercallory jamb between Wednesday and the twenty-second, bless. Grain, blabbed on slip-time, told its troubles to the tree (all runny in the oozy gyre’s incarnadine). She won’t run Thursdays. The underside of the little hand is tarnished; why is muk-amuk canonized so easy? Truck-tracks crow-foot creators drooling half-and half. She didn’t remember how or when, last time. Pavement sausages split; the cabbage remembers. Lions with prehensile eyes pick up their paws, apocopate, and go to town. Get with-it, mauve-peanut! Make it, thing-a-ma-boob! You won’t catch me slipping my sticktoitiveness under your smorgasborg. Fondle my nodule, love my dog. Lilting is all is easy. Knitting needles receed around the vision, baring his curviture, clearing her underwear. So that’s not what it’s for. French fried pickelilly and deep-dish-apple death won’t get you through that wake up in the morning alive. Your rosamundus may mathematik him, but it won’t move me one mechanical apple corer. I have come to to wound the autumnal city: the other side of the question is a mixed metaphor if I ever heard one. Timed methods run out: coo, morning bird. I could stop before breathing marble basonets. Salvage a disjuncture, it’s all you Middle of the ring around the Harley Davidson bush, blooming, blooming, shame, socks, dearth and passion pudding, flowers, or Ms. Crystaline Pristine. Her backwoods mystification is citified in the face. Pentacle pie and hunger city, oh my oh too much, my meat and mashed potatoes pansy, my in the middle of it biche.
Hart’s blood is good fly-catching bait. So’s fresh sheep-shit. Blatting about in the empty aurical, you think Atocha is in Madrid, what about 92nd Street, or what she told me of St. Croix? She isn’t your running the mill broad loom, sword, or side. She’s right on the guache circuit where a principle’s a principle with all hell lined up to get paid. Maundy, Tributary, Whitstanley, Horripilation, Factotum, Susquahanna, Summer-fine day. It’s all the same in the bitch’s kitchen. You look for the dice this time. Maybe you can wind up a winner. Summary, Mopery, Titular, Wisdom, Thaumaturgy, Fictive, Samoa and five hands over. When I grow up I’m going to get a vasectomy all my own. (A dendrite in the glans is worthy of the bush.) Why does he insist on winter all the time? You can stutter in the water but that’s not the way to think. Not thinking but the way thinking feels. Not knowledge but knowledge’s form. If there’s enough raisins, splay feet, and guilded hornet-heads, you can wish, dream, lie like a Saxon though you only prevaricate like a Virginia ham. George! the ingenuity I’ve expended to fill five missing days.
Conversation with furry Forest at Teddy’s:
“What are you writing now?”
“I’m not writing anything,” I said. “I haven’t been writing anything and I’m not going to write anything.”
He frowned, and I hoped a lot the lie had at least the structure of truth. But how can it? Which is why I haven’t been able to write anything but this journal in so long. And thank the blinded stars, I feel the energies for that going.